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A few weeks ago, Scott and I sat down and watched Star Wars, which I understand is often referred to as A New Hope, but that’s a much worse title, so we’re sticking with the original. Neither of us are Star Wars People. I love a good space opera or sci-fi yarn — I’ve been particularly enamored with my second playthrough of the Mass Effect series lately — but the Star Wars series wasn’t a part of my upbringing, and I never really got around to truly appreciating it. It didn’t help that the prequels were my main exposure to the franchise. So when everyone started talking about the JJ Abrams-helmed return to a galaxy far, far away, I didn’t feel much more than cautious optimism. If nothing else, I figured, it would make a lot of people very happy to see the legacy trio onscreen again, to revisit a world populated by countless alien races and adorable droids and plucky heroes and fearsome villains. Maybe I’d see it in the theater. Maybe not.

Over time, unsurprisingly, my cautious optimism evolved into genuine excitement. By the time the movie had been out for a week, it felt as though everyone I know had seen it, and they’d uniformly enjoyed it. Any indifference I had toward seeing it faded away, and yesterday, I bit the bullet along with Scott and some of our closest friends.

Relative strangers to the franchise have nothing to worry about when it comes to informed viewing. This isn’t a reboot, but it is a new story, one that’s fairly straightforward and captivating from the start. The seamless combination of old characters and new, the airtight script, and the galaxy-hopping story arc provide an easy entry into the mythology, and there’s something for everyone to latch onto, be it the most adorable droid the world’s ever seen, the soaring John Williams score, or the first time you see the Force in action. What — or who, more accurately — I latched onto was Finn (John Boyega). In a sea of well-crafted characters (and OK, I have a soft spot for Oscar Isaac like every other person on the Internet, and Poe was as good a charming rogue as they come), the reformed stormtrooper who rejects his finely honed, totally impersonal moral compass for the sake of a group of rebels he’s never met, was the one I rooted for, the one who made me smile or cry or both every time he showed up onscreen. (I cried a lot, actually. Usually over lightsabers, which doesn’t even make sense. I contain multitudes.)

Am I a Star Wars Person now? No, not really. I’m not going to defend the prequels or read EU novels. (I would also list “buy memorabilia” there but I already ordered my Finn Funko Pop Vinyl, so there goes that.) But as Scott put it after the movie, I get it now. I get why people love this franchise, why it was an important part of their childhood, why their affection will never fade away. I’m not one of you, but I get you, man, and I will gladly eat popcorn with you again at Rogue One.

“You know, guys, it always hurts to close it all up, strike the set, wipe off the greasepaint, napkin up the blood and entrails, and move on to another town.” – Joel Robinson, Mystery Science Theater 3000 (“Pod People”)

Well, it’s about that time, folks, time for me to list the things I wrote this year that appeared elsewhere online. But first, I’ll throw this out there: 2015 had its ups and downs, but in general, it was a pretty happy year for me. The hope, of course, is that I can take the bad parts and the good parts from this year and turn them into something great in 2016. And who knows? Maybe I will. Maybe I won’t. Regardless, I’m feeling pretty satisfied with life at the moment, and you can’t put a price on that.

Anyway, here, have some links!

How To Tell If You Are In A Goosebumps Book – I ran short on ideas this year, freelance-wise. This listicle, published in July, helped me break my streak. It’s very silly and laser-focused on a series for which I have a great deal of affection.

Why Hawkeye Was the Hero I Needed – This piece is nearer and dearer to my heart than anything else I’ve had published. It put me through the wringer emotionally to write about bipolar and my own experiences with neurodiversity through the lens of my longing to find someone like me. Nicole Chung at The Toast is a fantastic editor, and I was beyond content with how it ended up reading.

How To Tell If You Are In A Stephen King Novel – I was genuinely alarmed at how well-received this was. It’s the gentlest trolling possible, but it’s still trolling, so I’m glad people saw the humor in making fun of the Master of Horror.

Stars, Etc. – This one is new! The Post Calvin is a really neat idea from some recent Calvin grads, just a place for Calvin alumni to share ideas and stories from what they’re doing now that they’re out of college. I was allowed to pick any topic, so obviously, I wrote about the unfortunate reality of never seeing stars in the sky in Manhattan.

Look, as much as I feel the need to apologize for not blahgging in an egregious amount of time, I’m not going to. No one suffers as a direct consequence of me not writing a frivolous list of the best Billy Joel songs to listen to on a Tuesday afternoon or some such nonsense. And really, if they do, they can check my archive on The Toast. I wrote a snarky love letter to Stephen King in the form of a list for them this month (read it here!), so were anyone to suffer over lack of lists, they shall suffer no more.

Anyway.

For many months now, I’ve been on a text listserv called bgsd moderated by Kelly Sue De Connick, the brilliant, effusive, and extremely kind author of some great comics, including Bitch Planet, Pretty Deadly, and a couple runs on Captain Marvel. It stands for Bitches Get Shit Done, and it’s exceedingly simple but extremely effective: brief, punchy, motivational text messages. They’re all written with the intent of getting the recipient moving on whatever project they’re ignoring. For me, that’s usually a freelance piece, and reading any given missive from the bgsd archive now serves as a reminder that I really should be writing more. Anecdotally, it’s effective; since subscribing to bgsd, I’ve had three pieces published on The Toast, and one was actually a longform personal narrative. That’s big for me.

It strikes me that motivation works in mysterious ways. bgsd is pretty straightforward, but something I’ve found just as encouraging lately sounds weird even to me: a cartoon for adults about a depressed horse who used to star in a nineties sitcom. Most people on the Internet seem to have at least some baseline knowledge about BoJack Horseman at this point, and if you don’t, that “cartoon for adults about a depressed horse” bit is an OK summary. It is, for the most part, not a very cheery show. Sure, it’s a comedy, and there are laughs, but it’s balanced out by a very strong sense of pathos. BoJack (voiced by Will Arnett) is not happy, never satisfied with his life, even when he’s in a seemingly healthy relationship with Wanda (Lisa Kudrow) and filming the project he’s always dreamed of, Seabiscuit. (He’s a horse, remember?) There’s a striking scene late in season two in which BoJack realizes that nothing makes him truly happy in the long term. We see him coming to grips with that, to some extent, and by the close of the season finale, he’s striving toward self improvement again.

The most poignant moment of the season for me was the very last scene. BoJack is running and crosses paths with a baboon we see jogging past BoJack’s house every few episodes, and they share this exchange (which I’ll screencap from IMDB because I’m lazy):

Inspiration comes from the strangest places, and watching BoJack collapse, then get such simple advice from a baboon we’ve never really met before, struck a chord with me. I’ve been letting my health slide lately, skipping out on the gym and ordering three drinks instead of one. I’ve been relatively uninspired as far as new ideas for fic and Legitimate Writing go. I’m content, but I know I’d be happier if I worked harder on both those things.

So I’ve started using the treadmill at the gym again. (It helps that this week, every mile run means another dollar for City Harvest, a local charity. Good call, Blink Fitness.) And I’m slowly but surely cutting back on sweets, and I’m brainstorming whenever I can. It’s thanks in part to bgsd, thanks in part to BoJack, and thanks in part to my ability to look for motivation wherever it may come.

The last movie I saw in the theater was It Follows. It’s a good movie, maybe even a great movie, a sleepy horror story that embraces the idea of building dread throughout its run time rather than wasting its scare factor on jump moments. My favorite thing about it, though, has nothing to do with story or performances or score, all of which are more than satisfactory. The thing I liked most in It Follows — the thing that set it apart from so many movies like it, so many movies in general — was the setting.

(I’m going to get into personal anecdotes with this, so brace yourself or something.)

I was born in on the east side of Michigan’s lower peninsula, and though my family moved to the greater Grand Rapids area on the opposite side of the state when I was six years old, I still spent plenty of time back in Royal Oak and the surrounding suburbs. My grandma and grandpa on my mom’s side lived there, and from 1994 through 2008, my family and I would visit about once a month. As we got older, one sibling or another and their respective significant other would drop out for a month or a few, but we were all, as one, committed to sustaining our relationship with Grandpa, who passed away in 2006, and Grandma, who passed away in 2008.

I haven’t seen much of Royal Oak since then, but considering how much time I’ve spent there, my memories of the landscape are indelible. The Detroit suburbs have an indefinable midwestern beauty about them: trees that seem to drop their leaves through all four seasons, so-clear-you-can-see-forever skies, and crisp, cold air for half the year that’s suddenly interrupted by just the right amount of humidity sometime in the middle of May. The suburban streets are narrow, flanked by narrower sidewalks occupied by couples walking and children being pushed in strollers and dogs being dragged by their leashes. I always felt safe in those suburbs, however naive that may have been. Even as a charmingly jaded twenty-something, though, the thought of meandering through the streets of Royal Oak is a calming one. So naturally, since so much of It Follows was filmed in eastern Michigan was equally calming.

Don’t get me wrong here. It’s haunting, and some shots in particular stuck with me for hours after viewing. But mostly, it just made me nostalgic, even homesick. And that feeling lingered much longer than the creeping dread the movie so effectively creates. Yesterday, though, something reminded me that I have two homes now — my home state, and my city.

It happened when Scott and I were watching the Daredevil pilot. We’re not great at keeping up with current shows, but we were having a lazy evening, and neither of us wanted to commit to watching an entire movie after playing Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments as long as we had. So we tried out Daredevil, which, for the uninitiated (me), felt like a combination of the fifth season of Angel and the Toph Bei Fong black and white sequences in Avatar: The Last Airbender. In short, it’s great. And in the first few minutes, there was a single shot that really landed for me, something that never happened on Angel or Avatar or any other show I care about.

In one of the first scenes, we see the stupidly named Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson) talking on the phone as he walks down a Manhattan street. He passes beneath a few awnings and soon reaches the 50th Street subway station. There was one awning in particular that Scott and I noticed and immediately recognized. We’d seen it for the first time in 2012. New to the city, we were still getting our bearings, and some friends of ours took us to a restaurant known by a few different names: Japas 27, East 27, or simply East. It’s known for its karaoke bar and its unorthodox method of serving sushi — via conveyor belt, with differently colored plates indicating different price points. More than once, I’ve eaten cheesecake with chopsticks there after having my fill of spicy shrimp rolls. It’s not right around the corner from our place, but we’re repeat customers. And there it was, smack dab in the middle of the Daredevil set.

I realize that living where we do means I’m going to see my home on TV and in movies, hear it mentioned in songs, see it as the setting in books, et cetera, et cetera. But seeing the beacon of a restaurant I’ve been enjoying for years, one of the literally thousands of restaurants in New York? That’s different. That’s special. And, silly or maudlin as it may seem, it reminded me that I belong here, and will for some time.

1993: I was six and my family watched Jurassic Park. I didn’t make it past Lex and Tim in the Jeep, screaming as the T. rex snapped her jaws and nosed at that flimsy piece of Plexiglas that served as the Murphy children’s only protection from an actual dinosaur. Instead, I burst into tears and sobbed uncontrollably till my mom whisked me off to bed. I don’t know if she went back downstairs to watch the movie. I wouldn’t blame her if she did. It’s one of my favorites now—not the best movie ever, but certainly the one I enjoy the most.

1999: My dad took me to see Tim Burton’s version of Sleepy Hollow on New Year’s Day. He didn’t tell my mother it was rated R. I thought I could handle it. I was wrong. Since I couldn’t sleep that night for fear of nightmares, my mom let me get out of bed to watch the version of Cinderella starring Brandy. It helped more than you’d think.

2008: A friend and I saw The Orphanage, a Spanish horror film, at the local movie theater that played art films and second-runs on the cheap. I was living in an apartment with three other girls that year; all three were out of town when I saw the movie. The Orphanage—essentially a ghost story in which all the ghosts are small children—rattled me so badly that, at age 20, I slept with the lights on for the first time in my life. Not just some lights, either—every light in the apartment, including the lights in the second bedroom and the bathroom. Worse yet, roughly half of the scariest scenes in the movie happen in broad daylight, so I couldn’t even spend long stretches in my apartment during the day without checking behind the door before entering a room. I remember typing the phrase “NO TIME OF DAY IS SAFE” to a friend on AOL Instant Messenger, who simply replied with a drawn out “hahahahahaha.” I understand why it’s funny now, but at the time, it was no laughing matter.